LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Brahms & Dvořák

Michael Brown - Piano

Wu Han - Piano
Chad Hoopes - Violin

Paul Huang - Violin

Matthew Lipman - Viola

Dmitri Atapine - Cello

Dvořák - Selected Slavonic Dances for Piano, Four Hands (1878, 1886)
Brahms - Trio in C minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 101 (1886)
Brahms - Selected Hungarian Dances for Piano, Four Hands (1868, 1880)
Dvořák - Quintet in A major for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello, B. 155, Op. 81 (1887)

"The musical and personal friendship between Brahms and Dvořák is the stuff of legend. This pairing brings to life the creative energy that reverberated between the German neo-classicist and the champion of Czech folk music, producing a glowing array of classical music’s most essential works."

"Not all the great works of music that we treasure and enjoy hearing in ever-new interpretations here at CMS were composed in artistic isolation. Although it’s enchanting to imagine composers in their ivory towers of idealism and unadulterated vision, at times even the most independent of geniuses was influenced, inspired, or in some cases even intimidated by their contemporaneous colleagues.

Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann, Shostakovich and Britten, all worked in each other’s light, and their music, if closely examined, bears here and there bits of the spirit (if not the notes) of their doppelgänger composers.

Perhaps the most storied, and certainly touching, of these composer relationships was the one between the composers on today’s program. It was extraordinary for many reasons: first, Brahms was famously critical of other musicians, and his acid remarks and assessments of those around him are the stuff of legend; second, Dvořák’s and Brahms’s music are, for the most part, not really similar in the large picture, Brahms’s being the culmination of the German classic/romantic tradition and Dvořák’s the quintessential nationalistic voice of Bohemia, inherited from Smetana.

But each had something to admire in the other: Brahms said he would give anything to be able to write a melody of the naturalness and charm of Dvořák, and Dvořák actually sent his manuscripts to Brahms for corrections in his counterpoint and other technical matters. Dvořák was a devout Catholic; Brahms an atheist. Dvořák a happy family man, Brahms a loner who renounced marriage at an early age. But none of their external differences prevented the mutual admiration, and in some sense a dependency that turned out to be the wellspring for some of the world’s most beloved musical creations."